Recently in Tech Category

iPad it is, huh? Let's get the good out of the way first: very nice screen, beautifully designed case (The bezel's a little big; but, I'll get to that.), impressive that it syncs with cameras (with a dongle), handles 3G (for $130 extra), and is, for Apple, reasonably priced.

Problems:

• The name!! Come on people?! What're they going to call v2, iPad 2, Heavy Flow
• No camera front or back, probably front facing first, then wrap-around coverage in v3: Light Days.
• No multitasking for third party apps. Contrary to what's said, the iPhone OS does multitask, it just doesn't allow things like Skype to keep running in the background. I can see where developers could beat the OS to death and tie-up the built-in functions; but, those apps that screw up would be ridiculed out of contention.
• Adobe and Apple need to kiss and make up. No flash?! Don't get me wrong, I don't really like Flash much anymore, mostly because of the item above; but, though it's easy to hate in many respects, it has stood the test of time and enough people use it for their ads that Apple should be concerned about losing revenue.
• Speaking of revenue, funny how iBookstore looks almost identical to Delicious Library, I do hope those devs got paid. Also, what about annotations, searching a book, extending the functionality?! Oh, right, you can't because you don't get to have access to the file system.
• Speaking of restricted access, Apple has decided that users don’t deserve a first class file system.
• No shell

I’ve heard many interviews of this guy, Jonathan Zittrain, on NPR and elsewhere decrying the world of closed tech. At first I was full-blown fan-boy mad at him; now, I'm just a little ambivalent. On the one hand, it's true that the internet did allow, and mostly, still does allow, open anyone who wants to understand it to read the source code and dive in. There are plenty of examples of how and why this is bad. I won't get into them as I must go put on my ballet hat.

If you’re in the market for an eBook reader, the iPad is for you; as you'll be able to do much much more than any of the competing devices, it will be gorgeous, and probably even fun. The name, however, must go.

You cannot view your actual account balance through online banking tools; you need pen and paper. You cannot view your bandwidth usage: you can flash your router and install bandwidth monitoring software. I realize we're in our infancy in the online world; but, I call shenanigans on the nonsense banks' and cable companies' "Services" and "Innovations". I also love how banks can extend credit to you, without your permission, after stacking payments in numerical instead of chronological order and somehow this is a 'service'. Heck, I hope you're not receiving Social Security checks through your bank! If so, the bank will happily perform the 3 Card Monty on your debits and garnish your check to cover any balance. I find this most discouraging.

Tess had a little inspiration this morning:

Ringtone

So, I installed Ubuntu Server 8 today on an aged Dell that's been sitting around. The installation was as easy as falling off a log. Really. It was straightforward and apt-get is stupid easy. I did this because I needed a development platform for this Drupal book I'm working through. I started to put it on my Macs; but, getting GD to play nice with Leopard has proven a pain. All of the workarounds I've seen are for Leopard Server.

I'm hoping to deploy Drupal for Augusta West's (here is the old one) new website. I'll have to be patient with myself as I learn this stuff. At least I'm having fun learning something new.

I'm watching this:
Real Audio Link
The first speaker after the chair was Representative Cliff Stearns. He goes on and on and is wrong, wrong, wrong. Guess who's paying his way in DC?
Here comes Fred Upton. Guess where his money comes from?
Here is Mike Ferguson His top donors?
His argument is that piracy, read bit-torrent traffic devastates the internet; and yet, check this out.
John Shimkus?
From what I hear so far, it's a three hour hearing, these shills for the telcos are full of it. They want content creators to pay for the privilege of residing on their networks. It's the same as saying that only Lamborghini's will be allowed to drive on surface streets. That's great if you can afford a Gallardo; unfortunately, that's going to make we mere mortals unable to play. This is how the ISP's want it. I think the chairman of the hearing has it right on the money that there are so many red herrings in this debate you could fill an aquarium.
Please write your representative and tell them to support network neutrality

 
Here is another place, saying it better than I can…

Another success for DD-WRT! I just revived my cousin's old v2. I had to flash it twice, once with the mini to get passed the usual Linksys crap, and then up to the full v23 with dd-wrt. Fun. Now what to do with it? I haven't quite decided yet. I've got an Airport Express that does pretty well on one side of the house; so I guess I'll put this one in the wire closet for the back yard. That is, unless I give my cousin back his now working router, even though he was going to throw his away. Oh well. I have a Buffalo router that needs the dd-wrt treatment in case I do the right thing.

So I've been playing around with Movable Type 4 again. It's a bit frustrating. I think my problems are with specifying the proper paths. The documentation is lacking, or I'm an idiot. Either way, I keep getting 500 errors whenever I try to publish anything other than the index pages. Scouring through the error logs, I can see that the wrong url is supplied despite my best efforts to figure out what and where mt wants to point. Once I figure it out, I'll put the rest of the pages up.

After receiving a short note from Graham Percival regarding the known issue in the Lilypond GUI and Leopard, the latest release does play nice with TextMate. I have been able to start the tutorials and even create a little midi file. The reason I'm doing this is because GarageBand finally adds the ability to create custom ringtones for my iPhone. I can create the music in TextMate, use Lilypond to make a midi file, pull it into GarageBand and go nuts. Fun. I've almost got Christopher O'Riley's version of Bulletproof in there. I haven't played with Lilypond in some time and it's the learning curve is a little steep.
On another note, Tess has taken her first ballet class. Tammy asked her, "Don't you want to be a doctor?" "No, I'm going to be a ballet girl." So much for the fancy retirement community. I love her so…

So it seems Seagate Promise and Apple need to get their folks together. Those who know my Mac loyalty will also know that I'm not completely blind to Apple's faults.
I'm used to having to wait for third parties to get their Mac software together; but, several of my Mac program are almost unuseable. Soundtrack Pro 2 freezes consistently, for example.
My latest problem is with the drivers for Promise SATA controllers and Seagate's Free Agent Pro external drives. So far, knock wood, the USB 2.0 side works reasonably well, but the eSATA side causes my Dual G4 to panic. The Sonnet cardbus card fails with the FAP too. What a pain!
I feel confident that these issues will be addressed; but, it seems I'll just have to wait. One would think that Apple would have tested multiple configurations of available external drives, what with the whole Time Machine business. I'll try to be patient.
Patience = dispair disguised as a virtue.

I'm probably using a one-hundredth of the features of Quicksilver; but, Apple is going to buy this guy's software and incorporate it into 10.6 at the latest, right?! Turns out I can't live without this software! It's truly inspiring work. Check out this rare appearance by the developer: